You have one month to learn a language. Here's how.

How do you learn a language if you only have 30 days? Many of you might be inspired. You've seen something on TV or Netflix and want to learn Spanish or Italian or French, and you want to do it quickly. Here's how to learn as much as possible of your target language in the shortest time.

To be clear, you won't be fluent in a month. Fluency is a long-term thing. But if you want to communicate with native speakers to some extent when you go on holiday or travel, or move, this is for you.

I'm James. I'm a native English speaker, and I've been learning languages for 13 years.

Step one: use the 80/20 rule

Focus on the words that are most common in your target language. If you want to get by with people in everyday situations, you're not going to use niche words like "grandmother" or "hedgehog", which come to mind but aren't regularly used in real life.

How do you find them? You can ask an AI tool for the 100 most common words in Spanish, Italian or whichever language you're learning. That's a good start. You'll get words like "tomorrow", "yesterday" and "however", a mix you can roughly put together to have a conversation.

Then put the list into a spaced-repetition app like Anki, or Quizlet. You put in a word and it shows it to you at spaced intervals. You might learn the word for "tomorrow" and see it again a few hours later. Over time, as you know it better, the app shows it at less frequent intervals, so it stays in your mind.

Once you have the words, turn them into phrases: "I have this", "I am hungry", "I am thirsty", "Can I have...". Ask for the top 50 most common phrases you'd use in everyday life and put those into Anki or Quizlet as well.

It's not a one-off exercise. Build it into your daily routine. Set an alarm five minutes earlier in the morning and do 5 or 10 minutes of it first thing.

Step two: expose yourself to the language

Outside of those words you need to understand how the language flows. When I'm driving to work I listen to a Spanish or Italian podcast on Spotify. As long as it's 100% in your target language, you don't have to understand a word. You're getting your ears used to listening to it.

That's passive listening. Your mind works out the patterns of the language, how it sounds, the rhythm and the different words. Over time you'll recognise words you've been learning through your app, and your brain will remember them better because it's heard them in different contexts. YouTube works too. Just listen to the language as much as you can.

Step three: speak with natives

There's no getting around this, whether you want to learn quickly or slowly. If you want to be conversational, you have to speak with native speakers. The only exception is if you want to learn a language for reading and writing.

You have to get used to saying the words, pronouncing them and generating them in your head, even if it's not grammatically correct. You don't aim for perfection at this point. You aim to stick a few words together to make a phrase and get it understood. If it's right, you get a little kick. You feel good that a native speaker understood you.

There are apps like iTalki, HelloTalk or Tandem where you can get paid or free exposure to a native speaker. I'd recommend video calls where possible, rather than audio only or typing, because most communication is non-verbal. If you don't understand something, you can guess from their facial expressions, body language or mood.

Do this a few times a week. Three times a week for half an hour is good enough. It doesn't have to be an hour, which can be hard to fit into your schedule and is mentally intense.

Focus on conversations relevant to why you need the language. If you're going abroad and will be in a hotel or a restaurant, practise scenarios around that. It's more interesting and you only learn the bits you need.

If you're learning with a community of people, helping each other out, you're much more likely to reach your goals in a short time than if you learn alone, because alone you can get stuck and demotivated. One stat I've seen is that people are 65% more likely to reach their goals if they have someone helping them or learn within a group.

Step four: set a goal that can't be postponed

If you want to travel somewhere, book the flight and the hotel. Arrange something so it's set in stone and you can't postpone your learning. It's an extra level of motivation for when you just can't be bothered. You remind yourself, "I spent £200 on a flight, so that's why I'm learning this."

The reason you're reading this is that you want to get as good as possible at your target language in as little time as possible. So you need a time frame. You need a deadline. Get it set in stone, so you can't persuade yourself not to do the work and not to practise.

If you tell other people you're going to study the past tense this weekend, they'll ask how it went, and you'll feel a bit guilty. It's an extra layer of support, like a personal trainer keeping you accountable.